7.6 /10 1 Votes
Original title Les Diaboliques Publication date November 1874 Originally published November 1874 Page count 354 Country France | 3.8/5 Goodreads Publisher Dentu Pages 354 Adaptations A Woman's Revenge (2012) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Romance languages books L'Argent, Jacquou le Croquant, The Castle of Whispers, Visions of Apocalypse: Represen | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Les Diaboliques (The She-Devils) is a collection of short stories written by Barbey d'Aurevilly and published in France in 1874. Each story features a woman who commits an act of violence, or revenge, or some other crime. It is considered d'Aurevilly's masterpiece.
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D'Aurevilly, due to the boredom induced by bourgeois life in the Second French Republic, was a dandy. Similarly, the acts committed by the characters in these stories are induced not only by their extreme passion but also by their boredom. Some of the characters spend hours playing whist while others take delight in wearing fine clothes. All of the female characters are best at concealing their passions and are strong, independent instigators.
D'Aurevilly uses récit parlé, a bracketing narrative, as a structural tool for five of the six short stories.
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Publication
D'Aurevilly wrote "The Crimson Curtain" in 1866. "The Greatest Love of Don Juan" followed in 1867. In 1870, d'Aurevilly retired to the Contentin Peninsula and finished the collection.
When the collection was first published in France in 1874, it caused up an uproar with the French public and the work was declared a danger to public morality and the Public Prosecutor issued orders for its seizure on the grounds of blasphemy and obscenity. D'Aurevilly defended the work, albeit tongue-in-cheek, by saying that he himself was a Christian and the stories demonstrated the battle of good against evil.
A second edition was published in 1882. Dedalus Books published an English-language version in 1996.